Even No Man’s Sky’s Creatures are Procedurally Generated

No Man’s Sky, the procedurally generated space exploration game coming to PlayStation 4 late next year, is heating up quickly and now they’ve given us a look at the systems that govern the alien creatures you’ll meet.

Developer Hello Games’ art director, Grant Duncan, explained that the team looked to Earth’s creatures for inspiration. “Looking at their anatomy and skeletal makeup, and it’s quite surprising how few different types of skeletons there are. There are obviously variations for things like the length of limbs and the number of vertebrae and that kind of thing, but actually, roughly, they’re fairly similar,” Duncan said.

Just as Hello Games designed tools to procedurally generate each world to create a dynamic galaxy built on consistent rules, it designed tools to do the same for the creatures that will inhabit these worlds, focusing on modifiable “blueprints” for different types of animals.